Armenia’s June 7 election already being stolen

OPINION:

In a recent moment that passed with remarkably little notice in the West, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan acknowledged something extraordinary. The loss of Nagorno-Karabakh — the 2020-2023 military defeat that cost Armenia its principal strategic buffer and ultimately drove 120,000 ethnic Christian Armenians from their ancestral homeland — was, in his words, “a calculated sacrifice to preserve Armenia’s independence.”

Those of us who have spent years documenting what actually happened understand the acknowledgment differently. It is a confession.

Under the Armenian Constitution, deliberately surrendering sovereign territory and engineering a military defeat constitute acts of treason. Mr. Pashinyan knows this. It explains more clearly than any opinion poll what is at stake in Armenia’s parliamentary elections, scheduled for June 7.

This is not a normal election. For Mr. Pashinyan, it is a matter of personal survival.

A leader with an 8% approval rating, one of the lowest of any head of government in the world, does not win free and fair elections. He either loses and faces accountability or ensures that the elections are not free and fair.

Everything that has happened in Armenia over the past year points unambiguously toward the second path.

The blueprint is visible, and its components are already in place. Samvel Karapetyan, Armenia’s leading opposition businessman and a principal financial supporter of the Armenian Apostolic Church, a major target for Mr. Pashinyan’s malicious attacks, was arrested in June 2025 and charged with public calls to seize power illegally.

Just this month, just weeks before the election, his house arrest was extended by three months. This ensures that he cannot campaign in person.

The prior decision to detain Mr. Karapetyan was published on a website owned by the Pashinyan family just a day before the court formally issued it, vividly illustrating the Pashinyan government’s stranglehold on the judiciary.

Varuzhan Avetisyan — the leader of the National Democratic Alliance, Armenia’s largest pro-Western, center-right opposition party — has been imprisoned since May 2023 on politically motivated charges.

Then there is the language. From the podium of the National Assembly, Armenia’s parliament, Mr. Pashinyan declared that voters who choose opposition parties are “dogs and jackals.” He confronted a refugee mother from Nagorno-Karabakh in the Yerevan subway and called her and her child “deserters.”

Finally, Mr. Pashinyan threatens his own people with a new war, another Azerbaijani invasion, if he is not elected. A prominent human rights defender, Nina Karapetyants, has described this as a “hybrid war” against her own people.

Transparency International’s Anti-Corruption Center has documented the pattern, citing “widespread abuse of administrative resources” and warning that conditions for free and fair elections in Armenia do not exist.

Mr. Pashinyan’s ruling party has gone further still. Under an emergency procedure allowing adoption within 24 hours, it recently pushed through electoral code amendments, including giving authorities sweeping new powers to disqualify election observers.

The European Union has compounded the problem. Its $14 million package to “counter disinformation” ahead of June 7, combined with a “Hybrid Rapid Response Team” formally tasked with advising the office of the Armenian prime minister, amounts to handing Mr. Pashinyan a legitimacy stamp and institutional resources at precisely the moment he needs them most.

Armenia’s opposition has warned that this EU support risks providing a “green light” for election manipulation. The Trump administration, conspicuously silent since Vice President J.D. Vance’s February visit to Armenia, is equally inadequate.

The stakes extend well beyond Armenia’s borders. Washington is focused on Iran, and Armenia is directly relevant. A stolen election that helps keep in power an unreliable partner such as Mr. Pashinyan — who visits Russian leader Vladimir Putin regularly and signed a strategic partnership with China days after leaving a White House meeting last year — would put any regional projects with Washington at serious risk.

Three things must happen before June 7. First, the U.S. and EU must jointly deploy election monitors. Second, they must begin building direct ties with pro-Western opposition parties. Finally, they must make clear that imprisoning political opponents and assaulting the Armenian church will not be tolerated.

Mr. Pashinyan is counting on the international community to look the other way. He has done it before. The people of Armenia, who have paid an extraordinary price for the world’s inattention, deserve better this time. So do the Armenian Americans who will be voting in November, when the community’s verdict on this administration’s Armenia record will matter.

• David A. Grigorian is a research fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a 22-year veteran of the International Monetary Fund.